Category Archives: News

New research suggests that college students who regularly consume energy drinks are at a greater risk for future alcohol use disorder, cocaine use or nonmedical use (misuse) of prescription stimulants.

Gov. Eric Holcomb, front row, state Sen. Jean Breaux, to his left, and Michael and Lisa Patchner, middle of back row, are joined by other legislators and supporters of the bill at a ceremonial bill signing.

Dillon, at home in Delray Beach, Fla., says recovering drug users in his group counseling meetings frequently used to offer to help him get into a new treatment facility. He suspects now they were recruiters — so-called “body brokers” — who were receiving illegal kickbacks from the corrupt facility.

New research by the GMB union shows 186,000 public sector employees in the Westcountry regularly work unpaid hours. The study, based on the latest official statistics, shows almost 33 per cent of public sector staff in the region work an average of eight unpaid hours a week – the highest percentage in the country.

In both Sydney and Melbourne, our research shows more funding goes to moderately disadvantaged areas, on average, than to more advantaged areas. In Sydney, however, government spending in the most disadvantaged suburbs was very low compared to Melbourne.

At the tail end of Clinton’s presidency — with Sanders leading headline-grabbing bus trips to Canada to spotlight the situation — lawmakers defied pharmaceutical lobbyists and passed legislation to repeal the prohibition. The bill would have allowed the kind of cross-border importation of medicine that occurs in Europe — and that has helped reduce healthcare spending there. But despite those other industrialized countries success with safe importation, Shalala refused to certify that importation could be done safely. Shalala’s move effectively killed the legislation — even though it had been passed by Congress and signed by the president.

Penn State University’s former Beta Theta Pi fraternity house. In a single weekend in April, nine of the university’s fraternities and sororities had violated the university’s restrictions on drinking and social events. One fraternity had already been suspended for hazing its pledges – putting new members through demeaning initiation ceremonies – and circulating photos of unconscious naked women online. Members of Greek life were 50 per cent more likely to binge drink and 50 per cent more likely to be sexually assaulted, than their fellow students, according to internal statistics. And two months earlier, a 19-year-old student had fallen down a flight of concrete stairs at a fraternity house and died.

The Kazakh Ministry of Labour and Social Protection plans to establish the Family Support Institute in 2018, said Vice Minister Svetlana Zhakupova at an Aug. 7 Central Communications Service briefing in the capital.

Women, Family and Community Development Minister Datuk Seri Rohani Abdul Karim said the Social Welfare Department (JKM) is prepared to provide protection to children who are sexually harassed by their father pending the disposal of their case.

SWAT raids are being unleashed on a city still reeling from Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s 2012 decision to shutter half of its 12 mental health clinics, and privatize the remaining six. Emanuel is a long time Clinton ally.

Ultimately, Lighty explains, progressives clamoring for a truly humane and more cost-effective healthcare system are badly served by shallow political advice from the likes of Paul Krugman, who argued this week that single-payer is simply too steep a hill to climb.

In the second part of our series, the author of the acclaimed Chokehold: Policing the Black Man describes how stop-and-frisks are brutal assertions of police dominance on African American men, through sexual harassment, torture and even terrorism

Hong Kong’s regulatory board for social workers remains undecided on how it will punish pro-democracy activist Ken Tsang (above) over misconduct. Last year, a pro-Beijing social worker filed a complaint against Tsang to the Social Workers Registration Board (SWRB), arguing that his conviction constituted professional misconduct.

In 2015, Ahmed A. was an unremarkable Palestinian asylum applicant with dreams of a new life in Germany. Two years later, he went on a deadly stabbing spree in a Hamburg supermarket. His transformation highlights a growing problem among refugees in the country: mental illness.

Launching Wednesday, for example is a $2.5 million TV ad from American Action Network (AAN), a conservative group linked to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), which claims “America’s tax code is sabotaging our economy.” The spending on the ad, which will run on national cable and air in 24 Republican-held congressional districts, marks half of the $5 million the group pledged to spend on its “full-scale campaign” to push the effort during the August recess.

As recently as 2016, former Indiana Governor (and current vice president) Mike Pence refused to provide disaster relief to move families out of the toxic West Calumet Housing Complex and surrounding areas, where the population is 99 percent black. He did not hesitate to provide assistance to Greentown, Indiana, when the lead content of its water was slightly elevated. Greentown’s population is 97 percent white. As Nicholas Kristof noted in an op-ed in the New York Times, “The continuing poisoning of half a million American children is tolerated partly because the victims often are low-income children of color.”

New analysis by the Local Government Association, which represents more than 370 councils in England and Wales, reveals that in 2015/16 councils surpassed their children’s social care budgets by £605 million in order to protect children at immediate risk of harm.

The researchers found Appalachia lagged behind the rest of the country on health measures in the early 1990s — but only slightly. Infant mortality rates were not statistically different. And life expectancy was about 75 years — just 0.6 years shorter than that outside of the region. But when the researchers analyzed data from 2009 to 2013, they found the infant mortality rate for Appalachia to be 16 percent higher than the rest of the country and the difference in life expectancy was 2.4 years.

Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.

“We have to pay for that, it is social cleansing. The sooner they push us out, then they get their own way. We can’t fight back because we haven’t got the money, the power, the education that they have. They’ll always win because they’ll use the big words, they’ll use the courts. How can we fight? Who have we got behind us? Until this tragedy we had nothing, we weren’t heard.”

“With an aging population, dementia is becoming a greater health concern. This study supports the importance of controlling vascular risk factors like high blood pressure early in life in an effort to prevent dementia as we age”

Between 1999 and 2014, American overdose deaths involving opioids nearly quadrupled to 28,647 — much of the increase driven by synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. In 2015, the toll exceeded 33,000. In few places is the magnitude and the pervasiveness of the crisis more apparent than in Middletown, Ohio.

She later earned a master’s degree in social work from VCU and a post master’s from Tulane University. She also worked as a child welfare worker for the state of Virginia and as a program coordinator for Brighton Gardens Sunrise Senior Living in Bon Air.

The consequences for children and families cannot be understated. Medicaid is the nation’s largest health insurer for children, covering 37 million, or about 1 in 3 children. It also covers nearly 10 million parents. Had the federal government capped its payments to state Medicaid programs, in 1981 or in 1995, millions of children would not have realized the gains in overall health, educational attainment, and earning power that Medicaid coverage made possible, and millions of families would not have had the financial protection it provides.

London South Bank University (LSBU), on the edge of my parish at the Elephant and Castle, has introduced a training scheme for cleaners and catering staff to help them spot students at risk of being drawn into radicalisation. Getting them to spy on students is all part of the government’s widely unloved Prevent strategy, but what are staff supposed to look out for as evidence of radicalisation? Ordering hummus and mint tea in the student cafeteria?

Facebook is working on advanced facial recognition technology to identify users by creating digital faceprints. The company has begun lobbying state legislatures feverishly to protect its investments in the technology.

Hong Kong’s newly appointed bishop has pledged to speak out on issues of freedom and human rights, but insisted that the Catholic Church could not compromise on biblical teachings against homosexual behaviour.

Big Brother poster illustrating George Orwell’s novel about modern propaganda, “1984.” The book was first published in 1949 and describes a future in which a totalitarian regime controls what people think.

Of all the possible tragedies of childhood, losing a sister or brother to early death is almost too awful to contemplate. Yet it is startlingly common. In the United States, 5 to 8 percent of children with siblings experience such a loss.